I stumbled across this paper today as I’m getting back into thinking about social power. The topic itself I won’t discuss here, rather I’d like to make a comment on the methodology used. This is the main result: Fine result, what sticks out to me is they used “Bayesian multilevel models.” This means BLUP , as they don’t have a prior. I love Bayesian when there’s an informed prior, but when there’s not, we have this thing called OLS. It stands for “Ordinary Least Squares” and it has this nice property — when you have no prior, its estimation of dummy variable effects on continuous outcomes is unbiased and best. What unbiased means is that means is that if you repeat an e
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